"Trust Me, I'm Not Dead" -- but why should I?

I've been doing a bit of binge-watching lately, focusing on BBC crime fiction. I like the British police in their checked hats and of course the accent. And having been to London lately, I like to look for things I recognize. And of course the quality is generally very good; though it does seem like they recycle the same actors over and over, so the are comfortably familiar.

Anyway, I just finished the one available season of "River," which features a detective who all his life has sometimes seen what he calls "manifestations, not ghosts," which are images of dead or fictional people that look and respond to him like real people, but are not seen by anyone else. Well, he's investigating the murder of his long-time colleague, a woman, and she sometimes appears to him and either encourages or challenges him, but always enigmatically. The further he gets with the case, the murkier it gets, and the more he begins to doubt that his partner was the person he thought she was.

Okay, anyway, he begins visiting a psychiatrist, a woman, on order of his superiors. As River gets to know her better, he shares something of his story but always holds back. Finally she asks him to trust her, and he says, "why should I trust you when the one person I thought I could trust (his dead partner) turns out to be liar?"

The psychiatrist says "You can trust me because she's dead and I'm not."

I wasn't sure I quite understood the logic there, but I was more concerned with something else. I think the psychiatrist should have said, "I'm not dead yet." Because she will be some day.

I think the psychiatrist was repeating a fallacy we all grow up believing, that the world of people is divided in two, the living and the dead. Co-equal co-existing cohorts. Except they are not equal. Every dead person was once alive, and every live person will someday be dead. In other words, we're all at some stage of our journey to death, except of course for those who have already arrived. Life is not a category, it's simply a temporary phenomenon or station on the road.

As I approach the end of my Biblically-alloted three-score and ten, I become more and more aware of the impermanence of life. Today I bicycled through one of our city's largest and oldest cemeteries, and saw a lot of familiar names on mossy or towering old tombstones, names that embellish our streets and buildings and so on. The more successful these people were in life, it seems, the bigger their tombstones. But so what? They never got to appreciate it. More than that, no matter how hard they tried, how good they were, how whatever, they still grew old and died (if they were lucky, since many tombstones mark lives cut short). I wonder at what point they realized that life is not ours to keep.

There's also a spot in the corner of the cemetery, filled with rows of white stones, military stones, about 60 of them. All young men, in their teens or twenties, all born somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon line. They were Confederate soldiers, captured and brought north, and held in a military prison here in Madison Wisconsin. If you're at all into sports, you've probably seen the site of the prison -- Camp Randall, once a military base, now the site of the stadium in which the Wisconsin Badgers play football.

Back in the early twentieth-century, the 1930s or so, a woman who'd been born in Baton Rouge Louisiana and transplanted north, noticed those lonely graves and began to tend them. She brought flowers on Memorial Day, and so on. Eventually the site became known as "Confederate Rest." and a local landmark. And when she died, she was buried with "her boys." I never see those graves, which I saw today, without a twinge of special sadness, these young men who died so far from home and family, and whose families never got to say goodbye. They were once alive and vibrant, and died before their allotted time. They must have laughed and joked, and loved, perhaps hated, honest or cheaters, nice or mean, just people like anyone else, like us, like you, like me. And now long dead.

Everyone in the cemetery, Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, atheist, and agnostic, has passed over, and in one way or another has either learned some eternal truth, even if it was some last, sudden, realization that there is nothing more.

Given all that, I'm not sure I would buy into the psychiatrist's argument that living people are more trustworthy than manifestations of the dead; I think the dead might be more likely to know more.